ART. V. Journal of a Tour in Greece and the Ionian Islands. By William Mure of Caldwell. 2 vols. 12mo. Edinburgh and London. 1842. GOOD sense and good taste will enliven the most barren, and freshen the most worn-out, subject. Mr. Mure's Journal is not only the work of a shrewd and intelligent observer, and of a sound though modest scholar, but withal a very pleasant book. He is neither too rapid nor too elaborate in his descriptions; his classical illustration is apposite and copious, but without pedantry; and his glimpses of the existing state of things in the new Hellenic kingdom apparently just and discriminating. He is no romantic Philhellene, yet inclined to judge the leaders in the war of freedom, as well as the young kingdom of Greece, with fairness and candour. Travels in Greece are now inevitably doomed, like the country itself, to this singular and ill-harmonised contrast of the grey and venerable Ancient with the glaring and unimposing Modern. The ruins were doubtless far more solemn and picturesque when nothing was seen but an indolent and turbaned Turk reclining among shattered pediments and fallen pillars, not disturbing the grave stillness, but with the contrast of his barbaric costume heightening, as it were, the classic grace of the broken statues or mutilated reliefs, and almost deepening, by showing into what hands Greece had fallen, the melancholy emotions of decay and desolation. The associations which stirred within at the thought of what Greece had been-Greece, the wreck of whose religion appeared in those pillars of unrivalled height or exquisite proportion-Greece, the sculptor of those living forms, fragments of which strewed the ground-Greece, whose history was crowding on the memory with all its stately and heroic names, whose poetry was sounding within our hearts, and whose philosophy perhaps had been our favourite study-what that Greece had been was more forcibly displayed by what it was, the dominion of that utterly unintellectual Barbarian, the possession of a rude iconoclastic Mahometan. We doubt whether all this was not far more congenial to the frame of mind in which he who was worthy to gaze on the ruins of Greece contemplated those memorials of the past, than now that they are peopled by the busy and bustling so-called descendants of the Athenian and the Spartan, or shown by guides and conservators appointed for the purpose by a Secretary of State. As to the actual remains of ancient buildings, they likewise were perhaps more safe under the contemptuous neglect of the Turk, his superstitious awe of those haunted places, or his jealousy of those supposed treasure-houses VOL. LXX. NO. CXXXIX. K of of buried wealth, than when they are built about by modern dwellings, and enclosed perhaps in lines of regular streets. The Turk might occasionally use them as a quarry when he wanted stone, or pound their fragments into mortar; and if decay, storm, or accident threw them down, he would take no precaution to preserve them but at least they escaped the greatest dangerrestoration. In fact, desolation is the proper accompaniment of ruins; repose, silence, remoteness from the haunts of men, even difficulty of access, are required to give them their full influence over the mind. Even 'scenery which is hallowed by great events is desecrated and vulgarised by intrusive modern change. We have every ardent wish for the prosperity of the Græco-Bavarian kingdom; we hope that the subjects of King Otho, when they have thoroughly cast off the slough of their long servitude, may become a free, enlightened, and happy people; but, as lovers of elder Greece, and even as archæologists, we confess that we envy those who explored its wild oracular glens and fabled mountains, the sites of its dimly-discovered cities, and the wrecks of its oftenmisnamed temples, when all the mysterious gloom of centuries of devastation brooded over them,-when the region was, as it were, one vast Campo Santo, a land of hoary but sacred sepulchres, with scarcely a sound of life, and peopled only with the shadows of the mighty dead. No doubt we shall gain much in the accuracy of our knowledge. The German scholars, who are encouraged by the court of Athens, will explore every site, measure every building, and assign every temple to its proper god (and we are the last to speak disdainfully of this kind of erudition); but much, we fear, of the romance of classic pilgrimage (if we may couple such words) will be lost; we shall be less able to realize the Greece of older times; the imagination, the only restorer of the past, will be checked in its re-creative energies, and perhaps, knowing far more, we shall understand less of the Greece of our youthful adoration and our maturer reverence. We shall endeavour to keep Mr. Mure's classical studies, as far as we may, apart from his observations on the present state of things in Greece. We are indebted to him for some very happy illustrations of ancient authors, especially of Homer. The first place, indeed, on which he trod the poetic region of Greece was Ithaca; and we looked not without interest to the opinions of a scholar, so sensible and well informed, on the great Homeric question connected with the kingdom of Ulysses. We acknowledged ourselves (some years since) somewhat disturbed by the arguments of a certain Professor Völcker, who had thrown very great doubts on the Homeric geography of these islands.* We * Quarterly Review, vol. xliv. p. 161. have since read the reply to those doubts by General Rühle von Lilienstern, which has in great degree restored our peace of mind, and brought us back to the orthodox Homeric faith; though we are still somewhat embarrassed by the disappearance of Dulichium. This indeed was a difficulty which had puzzled Strabo and Pausanias before us, and we presume we must content ourselves with placing it as part of, or as connected with, the mainland at the mouth of the Achelous. But we are now fully convinced that the ancient Ithaca need not be banished, as by Völcker, to the extreme west of the whole group of islands, but may be restored to its traditionary site in the island which has so long borne the name. This is no trivial and unimportant question to those who feel, like ourselves, unexhausted interest in all which throws light on the history of the two great poems of antiquity, or rather on that of poetry itself. It is intimately connected with the personality of Homer, with the unity of the poetry, that is, its composition by one master-mind, the native place of the poet, and the parts of Greece in which the Odyssey, at least, if not the Iliad, was recited in the courts of the heroic kings. It involves the extent of the Greece of the heroic ages, the limits to which their early federation reached, the boundaries of their acquaintance with the circumjacent regions. Was Ithaca within or without these boundaries? If the descriptions in the Odyssey are altogether loose and inaccurate; if the relative situation of Ithaca with regard to the other islands, not according to strict geographical rule, but the ordinary observation of the common voyager, is entirely wrong; if the localities in the island itself, as they appear in the poem, are irreconcileable with the permanent form, structure, and character of the land; if there are no indenting bays; if the whole shore is a flat, level sand, where sea-nymphs could have found no rocks in which to form their grottoes; if there be no site for the city which would answer to the vivid description of the poet,then Ithaca must be altogether excluded from the Greece with which his hearers were familiar: it was, if not an imaginary island, one the fame of whose existence had dimly reached the popular ear, and which was the lawful domain, we say not of poetic invention, but of any vague conception which the poet might form from common rumour, or the floating intelligence derived from adventurous voyagers. For, it must be borne in mind that Homeric poetry offers itself to the hearer as truth; truth, that is, within the limited sphere of the hearer's knowledge. The Muses are the daughters of memory, not of invention; the poet of those days is the sole historian, and, in great degree, amenable to the laws of history. The poetic privilege of unreality, of avowed fiction, is altogether of a later period, when poetry has begun to be an artificial and conventional amusement. In everything, therefore, regarding common life, the work would be subjected to the most rigid, though intuitive, criticism. If the poet of the Iliad, among his warrior hearers, had represented a man slain outright by a blow, which they had often given and received in battle without being much the worse for it, he would have been silenced by the contemptuous clamours of the whole assembly; he would have been rejected as an impudent liar, rather than as a bad poet. So, if he described scenes and places well known to his audience, any important deviation from truth would have been resented as an attempt to abuse their faith, to impose upon them by an idle deception; and it would have been equally dangerous to have departed from the received historic traditions. These, indeed, might receive some poetic elevation; the heroes might be raised to a higher eminence of power, valour, or dignity, and their honoured descendants would not be too nice in their reception of this more or less delicate or ingenious flattery. The founder of a lineage might be brought down from the gods, or carried up to them, without any remonstrance on their part against the poetic apotheosis. But still they would require adherence to the well-known outlines of his deeds, strict accuracy in the genealogical tree, and fidelity to all the more memorable transactions of their ascertained ancestors' lives. In religious matters the poet would be allowed a wider range. From the infinite richness of mythological legend he might adopt what would suit his purpose; and, however wonderful the fable, religious awe would forbid the hearer from supposing but that it might be true. Gods mingling in the affairs of men, gods with human passions, and not impassive to wounds from human hands, were within the range of popular belief, and no man would venture to take offence at the improbability of such stories. Such an unnatural and untimely sceptic would have been in danger, like Socrates at a later period, of a charge of infidelity and atheism. Provided the true mythic character of each deity was preservedthe attributes assigned according to the general traditionary faith -provided no foreign gods were introduced into the legitimate host of Olympus-the field of wonder and of preternatural power lay open to the poet; and in one sense, therefore, Homer might indeed be, as he is said to have been, the inventor of the Grecian mythology, not as having created a single deity, or, unless as bearing on the direct action of his poems, attributed a single act, unauthorised by traditionary acceptance, to any one of the acknowledged deities; but as having popularised and made common to the whole of Greece the tutelar deities of the separate states states and races, as having moulded up the countless local traditions and national legends into something like a general system; as having collected all the scattered divinities of the whole region into one Olympus. So likewise, all beyond the geographical boundaries of Grecian knowledge would be the realm, we say not of acknowledged fiction, but of imagination, which might mythicise any report of a wandering voyager, or greedily catch at any monstrous yet stirring tale of 'Anthropophagi, and men whose heads It is curious that the few circumstances which had reached Homer relating to the Eastern and civilised part of the ultraGrecian world are mainly correct-the hundred gates of Thebes, the manufactures of Sidon; but the western coast of Africa, and the yet scarcely discovered Sicily,-everything indeed west of Ithaca,—is peopled with lotus-eaters, Cyclopes, with half-divine nymphs, and dim swarms of departed spirits. In which world then does Ithaca lie in the realm of Greek familiar knowledge, or in the wide and undiscovered ocean? When the poet of the Odyssey described the bays, the havens, the landing-places, the city of this island, did he draw directly from nature, or remotely from imagination? Were his hearers as ignorant, generally, of the situation of these islands, and of their outline and character, as of the coasts of Sicily or Italy? If either the one or the other had ever visited this region, the general features will be found consistent with truth. If they are utterly and inexplicably wrong both as to its situation and its permanent outline, the author of the Odyssey may have been a Peloponnesian, or at least have repeated his poems at the courts of the Peloponnesian kings; but the commerce with these islands must have been precarious and unfrequent-they must have lain beyond the usual coasting adventure of the young navigators of the mainland. But there can be no reasonable doubt that the modern Theakí is the Ithaca of Homer. Let us hear the opinion of Mr. Mure, the latest, and certainly not the least intelligent and impartial, writer who has brought his personal observation to bear upon this question: "The impression which a personal visit to this island can hardly fail to leave on the mind of the impartial student of Homer is, that, so great is the general resemblance between its natural features and those of the one described in the Odyssey, the difficulty is, not so much to discover in each case a bay, rock, cavern, or mountain answering to his description, as to decide, among the many that present themselves, on the precise one which he may happen to have had in view. In estimating the |